Characteristics of a Mentor
Characteristics of a mentor include:
- Encourage and demonstrate confidence in your mentee.
- Recognize your mentee as an individual with a private life and value her/him as a person.
- Ensure a positive and supportive professional environment for your mentee.
- Don't deny your own ignorance.
- Be liberal with feedback.
- Encourage independent behavior, but be willing to invest ample time in your mentee.
- Provide accessibility and exposure for your mentee within your own
professional circle both within and outside of the immediate university circle.
- Illustrate the methodology and importance of "networking" in basic science.
- Allow your mentee to assist you with projects, papers and research
whenever possible and be generous with credit.
The School of Medicine, in July 1995, initiated faculty performance-based
salary plans and evaluation guidelines, and these continue
to the present day. Within those guidelines are the requirements
for departmental and individual faculty members' goals with
respect to "teaching, research and clinical service"
and how those efforts may be evaluated on an individual basis.
The process of mentoring junior faculty is an excellent way
to demonstrate commitment to teaching, research and service.
The mission of the departments and divisions — which
includes the career success of its members — can be engendered
in the junior faculty by the senior faculty through a mentoring
relationship. A successful mentor/mentee relationship can
be a criterion for the faculty evaluation.
Your relationship with your mentee can take on many different characteristics. Some may see the role requiring active prompting and occasionally even pushing to encourage success. Others may choose a more Socratic position, exposing the mentee to many options, even offering opinions, but allowing the mentee to follow his or her own path.14 Whichever role you choose as a mentor, one factor is important above all others: while the relationship is not a marriage, you and your mentee should respect one another and share mutual regard. This seems a common-sense conclusion, but when mentoring is new to you, the old saw about separating the personal from the professional might cloud the obvious. The mentor/mentee
relationship, while occurring in a professional setting, is expected to go beyond simple professional boundaries. Try not to reinforce the idea of compartmentalizing the work life and home life. Your mentee is probably struggling with that conflict already. As a mentor you must recognize that your mentee has a life outside of work and success in that life will have an impact on professional success. Help your mentee learn to integrate his or her many roles. Bolster, don't berate, weak areas. Reinforce, don't ignore, strong areas.
A mentor's life is challenged by another argument — one that is rooted
in an appreciation of individualism and self-motivation. Our
culture in general, and medical academics in particular, prides
itself on the "boot strap" notion. You make your
own way, going through rough terrain alone (graduate school
and medical school, traineeships and residencies, post-doctoral
fellowships), just the way your profession's senior members
did. Knowing that you succeeded by yourself is supposed to
be its own reward. Even if that is the case, how long does
the reward last? Throughout your entire career? Wouldn't greater
rewards be possible if, after having succeeded and becoming
comfortable in that success, you "gave back" to
someone else? Those who support the concept of mentoring believe
this is the case.
Suppose you believe that you're ready to be a mentor; how do you go about finding someone to be your mentee? There are several ways to do this, including being assigned to a junior faculty member by your department or division chair. This assignation method is the hallmark of a formalized mentoring program and is not precisely what we are encouraging here. While formally pairing a senior faculty member with a junior ensures that the junior has a mentor, it does not ensure that the relationship between the two will be fruitful for either. In the next section on mentees, we discuss characteristics to look for in a mentor. What about the reverse? How do you, as a senior faculty member ready to serve as a mentor, go about finding someone who could benefit from this special sort of guidance?
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